A mattress isn't relaxing when it's flying at you

January 31, 2006

Matt Daniel of South Bend saw it coming toward his car. "And it scared the heck out of me," he says. If only he knew what it was. An adjunct voice teacher at Culver Academies, he was driving on Indiana 17 between Plymouth and Culver one morning last week when he saw something flash in front of his eyes. Yikes. "It was still dark and I didn't know if it was a deer or a big dog or what," Matt says. "But I knew I hit it." And it was dragging under his car. So he pulled over and figured he was going to find some bloody carcass jammed in his undercarriage. But before he could take a peek, a driver pulled up in his pickup truck and said, "I think you hit my mattress." Matt wasn't sure he had heard right. He hit this guy's mattress ... mistress ... matrix? "Your what?" "My mattress." There probably are worse things to hit at 55 mph. Ralph Winters of Culver was the other driver. He was heading north with box springs and a mattress in the back of his pickup truck when the mattress apparently broke free of its bungee cords and went flying across the road at Matt. "When it broke loose, it was one of those undefinable noises," says Ralph, who was doing a good deed by taking the mattress to the Marshall County Neighborhood Center. "When I looked into my mirror and only saw the box springs, I got this terrifying feeling." Matt knew about that feeling from the receiving side. "Ralph was extremely apologetic and since we couldn't pull it out, he immediately called 911 and got a tow truck," Matt says. But the mattress wasn't going to come out easy. After they pulled Matt's car -- a 2001 Saturn -- up partway onto the tow truck, they tried to cut it loose with wire cutters, but the mattress was wrapped too tightly around the exhaust system. "So a guy in another truck hooked a chain to the mattress and tried to pull it out, only to almost pull my car off the tow truck," Matt says. After that, they took their time and slowly but surely had the tow truck crank up the car until they could finally free the mattress. Matt, who performs with the Chicago Lyric Opera, certainly wasn't singing sweet music that morning. "But there was only about $600 worth of damage from a crack in the spoiler and bumper cover," he says. And the mattress? "After we got done freeing it, I don't think you could have made a good dog bed out of any of the pieces," Ralph says. "I guess I was pretty lucky," Matt adds. "One second later and it probably hits him in the windshield," Ralph says. "But five seconds earlier and he is able to brake in time." Ralph did say that when he hauls mattresses again for the Neighborhood Center, he will crisscross a couple of more bungees. Matt, meanwhile, thought his adventure was rather unique. How many people have hit a flying mattress with their car? "I asked my friend, Steve Goen, a South Bend police officer, if he knew of anybody that had ever run over a mattress. And he said, 'Yeah, me.' I guess he was following a truck that had a mattress in the back and it fell out in front of his squad car." So much for Ripley's Believe It or Not. Almost exactly a year earlier, Matt had experienced another close call when a woman pulled out in front of him on U.S. 30. He ended up in a ditch. "I told my wife that during the last week of January from now on, maybe I should just buy a bottle of Scotch and stay in bed," he says. Scotch? Bed? That kind of combination might make a mattress move, too. Bill Moor's column appears on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Contact him at bmoor@sbtinfo.com, or write him at the South Bend Tribune, 225 W. Colfax Ave., South Bend, IN 46626; (574) 235-6072.Bill Moor Commentary